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A local official listens, refusing a lunch invitation.
At his dining room table, Peter S. opens his
diary to a page from October 1942. In the entry
he described finding bodies by the road, covered
with birds. He does not want us to see the part
that reads, "Jews are easier to kill than flies, because
flies move very quickly and are small, but
Jews are large and move slowly." Before we
leave, his wife gives us pears from their tree.
A little dog yips at us as Raya Skarshevska
opens the door to her home. We sit around her
table and listen.
When she was 5, she says, she saw a Jewish
girl in a fine black dress and a beautiful red ribbon
in her hair. The girl removed these things
and dropped them on the road. She walked on
naked, looking straight ahead.
Little Raya wanted the ribbon. Her mother,
Vera, warned her not to touch it: "Today they
are killing Jews, tomorrow they will kill us," she
said.
Around that time, a woman pushed her
wounded daughter toward's Raya's house. Raya's
mother hid the girl under the kitchen floor. That
girl now lives in Israel and has a family of her
own. Vera was honored as a righteous person by
Yad Vashem.
The red-ribbon girl did not return.
The Honig girls of Luboml were welldressed,
my Zede recalled. Their father, Froim,
had worked in America and come back to
Luboml with money. The daughters "spent right
and left on good clothes. And he saw the money
goes like water." Froim returned to America.
"I thought he goes in the street and he picks
up the money. Yeah. He never told us what he
was doing." A few years later, my Zede went to
America and bumped into Froim on the Lower
East Side.
"He was driving a pushcart. It was already
dark and the weather was not so good. . . . I felt
embarrassed, but I came over and I said, `Mr.
Honig?'
"'Oh, Yankl' you here?
LUBOML
Yes,' I says. 'I came not long ago." My Zede
bought all his bananas and oranges. "You can go
home now, you don't have to stay in that
weather," he said.
It turned out Froim Honig was borrowing
money to buy his fruit. Every week he paid back
some and sent the rest of his earnings to Europe.
"So I wrote a letter to the family there," my
Zede told me, "and this is what I wrote: 'You
think that your father is a rich man. If you would
see him the way he stays on a pushcart, then you
wouldn't spend the money right and left.'
"After this, they wrote him that they shall
not.
"In a short time he died anyway. That kind
of a person, he caught a cold, he got pneumonia
and he went."
Luboml's little houses are surrounded by
vegetable gardens. A chicken steps between the
wooden slats of a fence, followed by her brood,
all talking to themselves as they scan their circle
of dirt. White ducks sit reflected in a puddle on
the road. A pig shrieks in its barn; a goat is led
to a grassy spot in the park and tied to a post; a
tiny kitten mews by the lowlit entrance to a bar.
"It's our zoo," laughs Mira Gusyeva, 20, who
acts as an interpreter. She says even chickens
find their way back home at night. Then, streets
are quiet except for the occasional drunkard.
During an evening walk, I hear a chorus of voices
singing a Ukrainian folk melody. The night is
cool and lit by a big moon.
When my Zede, Yankl, was a newlywed
here, his mother-in-law became gravely ill. He
took a train on the Sabbath to fetch a doctor in
Lublin. But his rabbi told him, "When you come
back to Luboml you put the doctor on a
[horsedrawn] taxi and you shall walk home."
"So I did," my Zede told me. "But I walked
so fast that time, I was young, like a deer. And I
came home before the taxi, because I made a zigzag."
Today, I do the same. From place to place,
my hosts lead me through back yards and alleys
and parks, along muddy paths between muddy
streets.